> If I understand the law correctly (and be advised that copyright law is a mess; purposely vague and murky, and no two lawyers – not even those specializing in copyright and trademark law – agree on anything), you have the rights to make your Fables movies, and cartoons, and publish your Fables books, and manufacture your Fables toys, and do anything you want with your property, because it’s your property.
The tricky bit with this is, are you okay accepting a lawsuit from DC comics, possibly one that will drag on for years and years?
Aside from the murky nature of the law, anyone can sue anyone in the US, for more or less any reason. And unless it's complete bogus and gets thrown out at an early stage, you can cause someone a whole bunch of hurt. Who is right and wrong according to the law only marginally comes in to play.
In this case, it's not even clear to me Willingham has the right to single-handedly place something in the public domain; did no one else work on those comics? Don't they also own a piece of copyright (which they perhaps signed over to DC?) This is like the main author of an open source project single-handedly changing the license, which isn't something you can "just" do even if you wrote 95% of it (even though many small one-line contributions often don't meet the threshold of originality for copyright to apply, it's not so easy to determine where this threshold is, legally speaking, and things can get quite murky rather fast).
It's essentially the same problem Willingham has, where suing D.C. is just too time-consuming and expensive, except that Willingham can choose to sue DC or not, whereas you don't choose if someone sues you or not.
I'm very sympathetic to Willingham's plight and I'd love it if more people would just place things in public domain (or other CC licenses for that matter), but here I'm not sure if he legally can, and even if he could it's murky enough that DC most likely will sue, so practically speaking he can't anyway.
I doubt that he's trying to put stuff he didn't work on into the public domain. This is more like an open source project maintainer relicensing their code and not that of contributors.
Everyone else can now write stories using the characters without worry. Anyone depicting the characters visually will want to make sure that they don't strongly resemble the art that DC presumably still has a copyright on.
I suspect if he got sued that he'd be able to get good legal help either from organizations like the EFF, or with crowdfunding. I'd certainly donate to that.
As I see it this move helps DC since they can now do whatever they want with Fables (make a movie, change characters, etc, etc.) without the author having any say as they also now own it 100% as the author says. At the same time they have enough lawyers to keep everyone else at bay for long enough that it won't matter.
According to the article, their contract still stands as it's legally binding, so DC specifically still needs to abide by it as it can't be unilaterally revoked. But the rest of the world doesn't, so there's loopholes if they do it not as DC but another entity.
And DC can create an LLC which is legally owned by DC but also not legally DC which can do whatever it wants. As I understand it that pretty standard for movies and how Hollywood accounting happens.
The tricky bit with this is, are you okay accepting a lawsuit from DC comics, possibly one that will drag on for years and years?
Aside from the murky nature of the law, anyone can sue anyone in the US, for more or less any reason. And unless it's complete bogus and gets thrown out at an early stage, you can cause someone a whole bunch of hurt. Who is right and wrong according to the law only marginally comes in to play.
In this case, it's not even clear to me Willingham has the right to single-handedly place something in the public domain; did no one else work on those comics? Don't they also own a piece of copyright (which they perhaps signed over to DC?) This is like the main author of an open source project single-handedly changing the license, which isn't something you can "just" do even if you wrote 95% of it (even though many small one-line contributions often don't meet the threshold of originality for copyright to apply, it's not so easy to determine where this threshold is, legally speaking, and things can get quite murky rather fast).
It's essentially the same problem Willingham has, where suing D.C. is just too time-consuming and expensive, except that Willingham can choose to sue DC or not, whereas you don't choose if someone sues you or not.
I'm very sympathetic to Willingham's plight and I'd love it if more people would just place things in public domain (or other CC licenses for that matter), but here I'm not sure if he legally can, and even if he could it's murky enough that DC most likely will sue, so practically speaking he can't anyway.